Holocaust Memories Must Survive

Holocaust Memories Must Survive

Article excerpt

Several years ago, I attended the bar mitzvah of a friend's son.
Uniquely in my experience -- and, I'd bet, most people's experience -
- all of the boy's four grandparents were Holocaust survivors. In
the middle of the ceremony, one grandfather interrupted: "I have
something to say." He recalled holding his grandson for the first
time 13 years earlier and exclaiming aloud, "Hitler, you bastard, I
beat you!"

Most Holocaust survivors did not have the option of direct
vengeance against their oppressors. They counted their victories in
survival, in descendants, and in the transmission of memories. But
nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, the stock of living
memories is dwindling. Not many remain who can still address the
Fuhrer in the first person: "I beat you."

According to a recent global survey by the Anti-Defamation
League, two-thirds of respondents either had never heard of the
Holocaust or believed historical accounts were exaggerated. And the
ignorance is concentrated among the young. This school year, in
California's Rialto Unified School District, eighth-grade students
were asked to write an essay on whether they believed the Holocaust
"was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme
created to influence public emotion and gain wealth."

School officials were forced to cancel the assignment. Which
National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke described as a "damn shame" --
the cancelation, not the assignment. Cooke complained that academic
discussion is too often "conducted between narrow and sternly
policed rails." The purpose of education is to cultivate critical
thinking, not "to indoctrinate our children with the values of the
state."

The application of ideology in this case -- an all-purpose
conservative critique of political correctness -- is intellectually
lazy. But the assumption of two-sidedness when considering the
Holocaust is positively dangerous.